§ Mr. Peter AinsworthTo ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what plans she has for additional testing of sheep in relation to possible BSE infection; and what representations she has received from the Food Standards Agency regarding the adequacy of present research. [8294]
§ Margaret Beckett[holding answer 18 October 2001]: Because of the difficulties of collecting sheep brain material that is in a suitable condition for strain typing by conventional bioassay in mice, and because of the length of time it takes to get the results from such studies, work is in hand to develop and evaluate molecular methods of distinguishing BSE from scrapie. SEAC has recently endorsed a programme of work at the Veterinary Laboratory Agency which includes a statistical analysis of the robustness of molecular approaches, retrospective testing of 1,400 sheep brains which were positive for a TSE in the VLA archive and prospective sampling of the brains from all clinically reported suspects which prove to be positive for a TSE.
I received a letter from Sir John Krebs concerning this issue and wrote to him on 24 October 2001 to explain the position.